What Henry James Knew & Other Essays on Writers

What did Henry James know? What does any author know? Is what they know important to how they write, or what topics their writing examines? Cynthia Ozick begins this loose collection of work with an introduction that quotes H. G. Wells's accusation against Henry James. In a James novel, 'you will find no people with defined political opinions, no people with religious opinions, none with clear partisanships or with lusts or whims, none definitely up to any specific impersonal thing...It is leviathan retrieving pebbles.' Bold words, and true enough, as it is. Many of James' characters do not seem to do a great deal, at least within the confines of the novel's pages. Nor do they talk much about things beyond the internal, or their relationships, or, often, art. James was never a great facts-stuffer like Pynchon or (George) Eliot, nor did he weigh down his text with massive amounts of allusion and reference like Joyce or (T. S.) Eliot. But what Henry James did have was an unswerving commitment to and passion for art, which through his genius came out in the form of novels, short stories, literary criticism, letters, notebooks and, disastrously, the play, Guy Domville. Cynthia Ozick's work uses James's great talent as a springboard to discuss first modernism and then a collection of Jewish authors, both pre- and post-WWII. The book is not directly related, with roughly two thirds of the pieces being previously published in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The New Republic, Commentary, more, and drawn together from over twenty years of writing. What Henry James may be the conceit of the first few essays - which explore first Eliot, then Wharton (a great friend of James), James himself, James again, and then Woolf - but then the collection loses its focus until it picks up another thematic unity by examining a range of Jewish authors - Bellow, Malamud, Singer, Scholem, Agnon. The remaining essays, scattered throughout, tend to be shorter, between four and fifteen pages, and provide a cursory - though interesting - look at more contemporary authors. At times, Ozick's essays descend into mere biography, which is either a shame or a blessing, depending on your preference - or perhaps both. It is interesting to learn of T. S. Eliot's rise to fame, fortune, and the Nobel - but how does it help us understand the great working of modernity and art, which is arguably the focus of the essay? Eliot 'seemed a pure zenith, a colossus, nothing less than a permanent luminary fixed in the firmament like the sun and the moon'. A literary giant, then, though no longer. Now (and Ozick is writing in the early '90s) he is a 'difficult writer', that horrible label against which only the strongest survive. He is unread - he writes poetry! - impenetrable unless you are learned, educated, determined and willing to bow at the altar of high art. A writer of Ozick's talent - for she is witty, clever, erudite, yes, but most of all, she is a charming wr